Immigration as Discourse

The aim of the course is to introduce students to the study and analysis of the discourses that frame international migration by providing the process with moral meaning to the phenomenon, as they structure it in binary terms – either as good or bad, just or unjust, true or false, and consequently those who support or oppose it as moral or immoral agents. The unit pays particular attention to “migration as performance” – as performativity transforms the issue into an embodied experience. Migration discourse is a constituent part of migration as a phenomenon, as would be the stories of migrants, as well as the parliamentary discourse that prepares migration policies. Thus, migration as a social phenomenon consists not only of (groups of) participants, institutions, many types of social and political (inter)action, but also, quite visibly, of many kinds of migration discourse as social and political acts and interactions. Central to the migration experience is “borderlandhood” – the crisis that strips the individual of his social roles, fills him with anxiety and opens up unlimited opportunities for the restructuring of his social person and social contour. The migration crisis and the huge migration flows that entered Greece and the EU in the summer of 2015 were not a “random” event, an event outside the social and political processes that were taking place in Greece at that time. On the contrary, the “breaking of Fortress Europe” was a consequence of these processes, closely linked to the power struggles for the symbolic and organizational control of the public sphere in Greece at that time. We examine the ways in which various representations shaped the symbolic configuration that came to dominate the Greek public sphere in the following years.